# RPG a Day 2026 - 15: Endurance tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] Here we are, halfway through the month. I've finally caught up with trying to get RPG a Day 2026 out the door on a regular basis. August was never going to happen. I was going to be out of town far too much, so we bumped it to September. September has been shockingly hard to catch up with because things just kept coming up. Good things, in fairness, but things that kept me from writing. For those who have sat down and tried to do a regular writing gig, whether it be paid or free, you know it can get kind of rough, especially if you have to do two or more a day just to catch up with where you should be. Tonight, we should be where we should be, but that's tonight. Today, we're talking about endurance. We could go on at great length about endurance as a game mechanic and what it means, why there are a thousand different implementations of it, how they came to be, and what I think is the best one. Instead, I think it's a better idea to talk about the endurance of something in the game that often gets swept under the rug: the GM, the keeper, the facilitator, the guy that shows up every day with the expectation that they are going to be doing the heavy lifting of making the game happen. Whether that be: - Preparing an in-depth scenario that the players are guaranteed to ignore (to the game's advantage) - Making sure that everybody is engaged and happy to be there - Investing fat stacks of cash in making sure that they have all the books associated with the game in question and that they've studied them well enough to be able to play the game I'm going to refer to them as the facilitator for the rest of this article because I don't want to limit us to just the classic RPG architecture of centralized power. This is true even for those who specialize in GM-less games, like I do. Someone still has to know the rules, someone has to get the group together, someone has to teach the game, and that's the facilitator. Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a place far, far away from wherever you are, I was my local Omni GM. That's right, I played centralized authority, traditionally architected RPGs. In part, because that's really all that was out there at the time. It was, after all, the late 80s. I was in high school, and the evolution of the indie RPG scene, and just as importantly, fast and easy distribution of new RPG texts had not come to fruition. **Palladium** seemed cutting edge for us. **[[Call of Cthulhu|Call of Cthulhu]]**, **[[Robotech|Robotech]]**, and **[[Shadowrun|Shadowrun]]** were the three big pillars of things that I would run at the drop of a hat and then drop the hat myself. These are the things that really started my now ludicrous collection of RPGs. Moreover, I would run any game you put in front of me. Drop a big fat hardback or softback full of 8 1/2 by 11 formatted words, and I'd have it digested in a couple of days and ready to run. Not only that, I'd run a good game, one built on the process of building characters, of grounding them in the world, of making sure that they were full of motivations. I didn't know it at the time, but I was leading the charge on some ideas that eventually became more mainstream. I'm going to blame that on access to Usenet and spending way too much time there. Between [FidoNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet)[^1] and [PCBoard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard), the nascent internet and BBSs prepared me for life to come in the digital world, and especially in the RPG hobby. This could not last. I'm not talking about the digital lifestyle that obviously I'm still living, whether it be for good or ill, but I'm talking about being the Omni GM, or as others have put it, the Forever GM. That's the guy who's stuck always *playing* a game and never *getting to play* because they're the ones with the most expertise, the most familiarity, and the skill set built up around how to run games for other people. I was the Omni GM and I didn't see any way out. There was a way out, of course. It took a while to show up. I'm happy to say that I was part of that showing up, but it came through the hard work of the development of GM-less games. These are games in which the distribution of responsibility is more evenly pushed around the table.[^2] A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. I became happier with the time I was actually sitting at the table with other people. My endurance, which was being sorely pushed at that point, felt less aggressively eroded because I was no longer responsible for "bringing the fun" to the table every time the fun needed to be brought. You actually don't know how big a deal that is until you feel it lifted off of you. Then you end up looking around at other people's tables and you see that their GMs are increasingly leaning on pre-written scenarios, which give them the illusion they've reduced their prep. Instead, scenarios commit them to memorization and to simply aping someone else's lines in order to bring the game to the table at all.[^3] You see GMs burning out left and right because their endurance is at an end, and they regret it. They want to keep playing. They want to keep enjoying their time with their friends in a social context they understand. Happily, you see games embracing less constricting methodologies, lighter mechanics, more procedurally generated content, and more interpretation. The space for the Omni GM to stop GMing and just be another player at the table with everyone else becomes much more open, much more welcoming, much more freeing. In the early 2000s, GM-less play really took off as a result of a lot of people who had been theorizing at The Forge, including myself. They were finally getting stuff published, and publishing became much more accessible with the arrival of Lightning Print for print-on-demand in the marketplace. My endurance was returning, and the amount that I got to play was increasing because my play was literally that. I got to play. For a while, I wandered away from the RPG hobby. My particular favorite corner, indie gaming, was becoming increasingly politicized, and the polarization wasn't in my favor. It was becoming (and has remained) increasingly devoted to the U.S. political left and loudly trumpeting political ideas rather than interesting narrative ideas. I drifted away from RPGs and fetched up in more welcoming waters: tabletop wargaming. This was a great place for me. Mechanics were important. Every session at the table told a story. The players were friendly, and the creators wanted you to play their game and have a good time. I won't say it was an ideal environment, but it was damn fine. I was playing games, enjoying myself, and excited to be there. Then an interesting change began sweeping through wargaming, or at least my portion of it. More Narrativism was creeping in — more storytelling, more innovation — which looked to change pretty classic wargaming into what we now call "[[adventure wargaming]]."[^4] I started to be interested in what was going on in my old hobby space and stuck my head back over. What I discovered was fascinating. While wargames were beginning to retread the territory that transformed them into RPGs in the first place back in 1974, RPGs had taken a further evolutionary leap and began establishing themselves as both co-op and solo play, previously largely the province of tabletop wargames. Narrative co-op was the sweet spot I had been waiting for my whole life. Shared responsibility, GM-lessness, and a lack of oppositional assumption all played into not just getting to play the game, but getting to play the game as expected by the creators in a way that was fun, exciting, and rewarding. If there was anything that was going to fully restore my endurance, it was the presence of co-op play in that venue. Solo play was just gravy, and it has since become the thing that keeps me from being exhausted. Solo play means I can play whenever I want to, however I want to, with whatever tools I want to, whatever game I want to. I don't have any responsibility to anyone other than myself to bring the fun. I always bring the snacks for myself. I like me just that much. Today, the most exhausting thing I do in the hobby is choose to write about it. That's not necessarily a painful exhaustion. It is the fulfillment of an effort that is worth it. Why is it worth it, you might ask? Because I have a tangible artifact at the end. I have something that I can show you and look at myself to say, "I was here." An endurance race needs a finish line, even if it's just a temporary finish line, a finish line for the moment. Putting together an article like this, as strange and rambling as it may be, is another finish line. There will be another finish line tonight when I publish the next article in the RPG a Day 2026 series, another the next day, and another the next. There's a finish line the next time I sit down to play **[[Ironsworn]]** or pick up *[[The Solofull Fane|SoloFane]]*, which I really need to get to because I've let it sit too long. There's a finish line when I go on to X and talk to people about the responsibilities of being a GM, a Keeper, or just a player at the table. My endurance, as often as it's taxed, is restored by the race itself. It may be that your endurance is starting to feel taxed. It may be that you are starting to feel the exhaustion weigh down your limbs. You look at the prep for your next game and realize you don't really want to do the prep; you just want to play. It may be that you miss the joy of sitting down at the table with your friends and not feeling like you are responsible to them for their happiness. It may be that you just want to do something different because you've done the same thing over and over. It may be that your endurance is near its end. You can play the game, my friend. You have choices. You can rest, or you can change your grip on your burden. Don't feel like you have to be the only one to carry it. Don't feel like you have to be the only one who should. Be willing to experiment and go beyond what you think traditional gaming should be like. Be willing to choose another race. Be willing to put down your burden. Your endurance is what keeps you in the hobby. Marshal it, train it, but be kind to yourself and be willing to do something new, so that you have all the more endurance for the next thing you discover you love. Gaming endures. [^1]: AKA Fight-O-Net. It was a contentious time. [^2]: I've recently put in a local translation of something I've been working on for a while: a breakdown of essentially RPG history that goes back to 1974 and touches on the distribution of authority from the crystallized centralized authority of the GM out to modern games which are both GM-less and fiction forward. You can see that over at **[[The Architecture of Control - A Timeline of RPG Authority]]**. [^3]: **[Chubby Funster](https://x.com/ChubbyFunsterGC)** has written about this and made videos about it on multiple occasions, which is definitely content worth checking out if you're interested in how someone who still remains within the classic RPG architecture is dealing with it. He's especially good on the information side of the job — see [**Structuring a TTRPG Setting Around What a GM Actually Does: Can We Minimize Cognitive Load?**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv9T_MHyxS8) and [**Reducing Cognitive Load through RPG Design**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7h0VaWM3fM) — and on running published modules, like [the four-part Dungeon Analysis deep dive on *The Lost Mine of Phandelver*](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9NiTdvX2NITT9Wkkxab9BR-dRC9srmc9). [^4]: See pretty much *everything* from [[Two-Hour Wargames]].